First Move in the Corner

    Keywords: Opening

I would like to present some analysis of the first moves played in the corners based on the games present on the GoGoD CD. I used Kombilo to perform a search for empty quadrangles across all the games included on the January 2002 version of the CD. Games that start with 4+ handicap stones on the board will not turn up any hits for the search pattern since there are no empty corners at the start of the game.

[Diagram]

Search Pattern

[Diagram]

Continuations


Kombilo returned 51,747 hits from 13,362 games (unfortunately there is a slight problem with the number of hits since there is some double counting involved at the edges, but that is as good as it gets for now :-)

(SAS: Do you have the corresponding figures for the 5-5 point? DaveSigaty: I skipped all other choices for this analysis since there are far fewer examples, 0.9% of the total or less than 500 altogether. In the case of the 5-5 point there are only about 25 cases - good for study but meaningless for trends I think.)

I have the following thoughts about these figures (all of them off the top of my head):

Kombilo reports the winning percentage for the results that it finds. The winning percentages from the empty corner analysis let us ask whether Move One Loses the Game


This is a copy of the living page "First Move in the Corner" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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